Open Infrastructure

Citation

Jon Udell describes the different layers of an open infrastructure:

"We’ve already seen how open source software projects harness collective effort to produce quality results. We’re now seeing how open content projects such as Wikipedia do the same. Can open infrastructure be far behind?

Arguably it’s already here. Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, notes that if we regard the P2P file-sharing networks from a technical rather than a political/legal perspective, we observe the evolution of robust decentralized storage systems.... Operating on a smaller scale but at a higher level in the stack, open content delivery networks such as CoralCDN, which I mentioned a year ago, will challenge proprietary CDNs (content delivery networks) such as Akamai... Beyond CDNs lie service delivery networks... If I were the next Linus Torvalds, itching to create the Linux of open infrastructure, this is where I’d scratch. Innovation in open source was about process more than technology. Innovation in open infrastructure will require both." (http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/07/26/31OPstrategic_1.html)